Re: Real Space Combat Help:

> I think Railguns/ Mass drivers can be extremely effective considering 
> you can tailor the ordinance you can fire. For instance:
> 
> 1. Stealthy Penetrator rounds!
> 2. Stealthy missiles that flip on their drives just outside the 
> target's defensive envelope!
> 3. Bomb pumped x-ray lasers!
> 4.Big Rocks!
> 5.Frozen Chickens!
> 
> In combat I think that you would lay down a "probability pattern" of 
> most likely hits. 

This railgun idea for near future space combat reminds me of the GDW
game Triplanetary, now owned by Steve Jackson Games.  The rules for 
that game depicted the armaments by the various spaceships as high
rate of fire machine guns, which was lampooned in the Murphy's Rules
section of the Space Gamer.

Given that turreted Gauss guns or railguns would be able to lay down 
a pattern of projectiles into the anticipated path of an enemy and the
high kinetic energy results from an impact, would make these viable
weapons.

Defenses would be high manueverability and a low target silouette.
Trying
to build an armor defense against these would be pointless.

Jon Davis
davisje@crd.ge.com